“The world and its conditions are mounts for the Hereafter..and whoever loses the mount, loses access” is a phrase in which Ibn Khaldun summed up his vision of the essence of the problems and problems of the Islamic world: There is a problem in the world and its conditions.
Ibn Khaldun was a scholar, judge, social philosopher, historian, and so on.
And he devoted his superior skills and unique capabilities to answering the question: What is the problem in the world and conditions of Muslims?
His diagnosis of this problem was that it was "corruption of power" in the sense of corruption and decline in the power of the human actor (in this case, Muslims are the ones whose urbanization was characterized by a continuous collapse of states and ruling elites).
Ibn Khaldun set out with his knowledge and methodological repertoire, probing the conditions of Muslims and their world in his most important book: “The Lessons and the Divan of the Beginner and the News in the Days of the Arabs, the Persians and the Berbers, and their Contemporaries with the Greatest Authority”, from which his introduction became famous and became famous among the people.
The phenomenon of power and power was at the heart of Ibn Khaldun's interest, as he saw that power and social power are the essence of urbanization and that it is inevitable and inevitable.
Ibn Khaldun lived in the 14th century AD (eighth AH) (732-808 AH / 1332-1406 AD) at a time when the Islamic world reached an unprecedented degree of fragmentation and disintegration, the most prominent of which was the multiplicity of political units and their constant conflict with each other.
This decomposition will continue on its upward curve until it reaches 24 countries in (900 AH / 1494 AD), 26 countries in (950 AH / 1543 AD), 29 countries (999 AH / 1592 AD), and 35 countries (1149 AH / 1736 AD).
He rejected this situation, which was a gateway to weakness and decline in the Muslim world, and decided to lead a "revolution" of a different kind against these miserable conditions.
He studied the history of Muslims in the context of global history, and examined the cycles of sovereignty and hegemony from one dynasty or ruling elite to another.
Ibn Khaldun explained it as a cycle or a process with successive and "inevitable" stages.
Thus he drew attention to the "inevitable" instability of all pre-modern Muslim dynasties.
The reason for this inevitable instability, according to Ibn Khaldun, was the problems of legitimacy, loyalty, and control resulting from the lack of regular patterns in the circulation of power and power (which had begun to develop in the European ruling dynasties at the time).
This was the interpretation of Ibn Khaldun, who is rational and realistic.. at a time when other scholars and thinkers of his time were preoccupied with evaluating what they saw as the lack of effectiveness among Muslims as a result of the absence of visionary leadership.
The phenomenon of power and power was at the heart of Ibn Khaldun's interest, as he saw that power and social power are the essence of urbanization and that it is inevitable and inevitable.
He began by explaining the basic needs of human beings, which automatically motivate them to live together, and he spoke that man is of course civil.
Then he dealt with the development of human groups with the inevitable emergence of nervousness as a collective and psychological bond that binds people with a solid bond.
Then he said that the goal to which fanaticism runs is the king, then he saw that the conflict is inevitable, as it is in the nature of the king to be alone with glory, in addition to the fact that the king is for those who do not have a compelling hand over his hand.
And the fate of all pre-modern Islamic states, empires, and ruling dynasties was decomposition and decline.
This has happened many times before, and it was the result of the inevitable weakness of the state that relied on conquest or military conquest and based on military protection, which turned into absolute centralization.
The three great Islamic empires: the Ottoman, the Safavid, and the Mughals were variations on the brand of military patronage or patronage, which had four basic characteristics:
Military patronage states were, as the name suggests, primarily military.
At the head of the community was a chief military leader who relied on subordinate chiefs to administer local government.
Society was divided into two "classes": the ruling military class, which performed military and other services for the rulers, and the rest of the people whose job it was to produce a surplus that could be subject to taxation.
Almost all economic resources belonged to the main military family or families.
This family or ruling families can redistribute these resources as they wish, which they did.
They often did this in exchange for the above-mentioned services rendered by local notables;
Hence the "nepotism".
The laws of military patronage states combined ruling family law, local customs and norms, and Islamic law.
These countries used to share their political theory with other Islamic countries based on the circle of politics, justice or power, which Ibn Khaldun summarized by saying: “The world is a grove of the state’s fence, the state is a sultan by which the Sunnah lives, the Sunnah is a policy governed by the king, the king is a system supported by the soldiers, the soldiers are helpers who guarantee them Money, money is sustenance collected by the subjects, the subjects are slaves whose understanding is surrounded by justice, justice is familiar and with it is the order of the world. The world is a garden...".
Ibn Khaldun was aware that he was making a new line and weaving on a previous pattern, but he was aware that he had not exhausted his purposes yet and that his project to save the Islamic world was incomplete.
These countries lacked the development of their political theory in order to respond to the fundamental problems that were afflicting the Islamic civilization. In fact, there was a struggle to read the reality and see the future between the ruling families and dynasties, whose vision was all deficient.
The internal conflict and the lack of agreement on a single vision of reality and the future exists in all human societies.
However, the decisive difference is always in the presence or absence of a stable system to resolve these differences.
The Western solution to this problem was democracy.
Despite all its defects, democracy answers Ibn Khaldun's question related to "Why do states fail in Islamic urbanization and why is there no agreed-upon method for the transfer of power?"
There is another fundamental problem that the Khaldunian vision poses to us, and it is a problem related to the absence of social nervousness that builds and drives political development.
In most cases, the modern state crushed the natural social and economic foundations of fanaticism in Islamic urbanism, and alternative institutions were cultivated in a coercive and superficial manner, which became a satanic plant in a society that originally rejected it while it conquered it on the other hand.
In some other cases, fanaticism coexisted with the modern state and one did not obey the other (as in Yemen, for example), but this also did not succeed in making any kind of penetration into the structure of political backwardness.
The Khaldunian intellectual traditions have always been remarkably ignored, and those who pay attention to them often miss that they are fundamentally incomplete.
Ibn Khaldun was aware that he was making a new line and weaving on a previous pattern, but he was also aware that he had not exhausted his purposes yet and that his project to save the Islamic world was incomplete.
Although he studied, analyzed, and explained the problem of the world and the conditions of Muslims and dealt with the problem of corruption of courage, he did not have the time to talk about solutions in work and movement stemming from problems in thought and imagination.
Hence, Ibn Khaldun, although he was a true revolutionary, and a revolutionary of a special kind, but his revolution remains incomplete and is waiting for someone to complete it.